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.The hardinessof their ordinary life prepares them for the fatigues of war, to someof which their necessary occupations bear a great analogy.Thenecessary occupation of a ditcher prepares him to work in thetrenches, and to fortify a camp as well as to enclose a field.Theordinary pastimes of such husbandmen are the same as those ofshepherds, and are in the same manner the images of war.But ashusbandmen have less leisure than shepherds, they are not sofrequently employed in those pastimes.They are soldiers, butsoldiers not quite so much masters of their exercise.Such as theyare, however, it seldom costs the sovereign or commonwealth anyexpense to prepare them for the field.Agriculture, even in its rudest and lowest state, supposes asettlement: some sort of fixed habitation which cannot beabandoned without great loss.When a nation of merehusbandmen, therefore, goes to war, the whole people cannot takethe field together.The old men, the women and children, at least,must remain at home to take care of the habitation.All the men ofthe military age, however, may take the field, and, in small nationsAdam Smith ElecBook Classics The Wealth of Nations: Book 5 926of this kind, have frequently done so.In every nation the men ofthe military age are supposed to amount to about a fourth or a fifthpart of the whole body of the people.If the campaign, should beginafter seed-time, and end before harvest, both the husbandman andhis principal labourers can be spared from the farm without muchloss.He trusts that the work which must be done in the meantimecan be well enough executed by the old men, the women, and thechildren.He is not unwilling, therefore, to serve without payduring a short campaign, and it frequently costs the sovereign orcommonwealth as little to maintain him in the field as to preparehim for it.The citizens of all the different states of ancient Greeceseem to have served in this manner till after the second Persianwar; and the people of Peloponnesus till after the Peloponnesianwar.The Peloponnesians, Thucydides observes, generally left thefield in the summer, and returned home to reap the harvest.TheRoman people under their kings, and during the first ages of therepublic, served in the same manner.It was not till the siege ofVeii that they who stayed at home began to contribute somethingtowards maintaining those who went to war.In the Europeanmonarchies, which were founded upon the ruins of the Romanempire, both before and for some time after the establishment ofwhat is properly called the feudal law, the great lords, with alltheir immediate dependents, used to serve the crown at their ownexpense.In the field, in the same manner as at home, theymaintained themselves by their own revenue, and not by anystipend or pay which they received from the king upon thatparticular occasion.In a more advanced state of society, two different causescontribute to render it altogether impossible that they who takeAdam Smith ElecBook Classics The Wealth of Nations: Book 5 927the field should maintain themselves at their own expense.Thosetwo causes are, the progress of manufactures, and theimprovement in the art of war.Though a husbandman should be employed in an expedition,provided it begins after seed-time and ends before harvest, theinterruption of his business will not always occasion anyconsiderable diminution of his revenue.Without the interventionof his labour, nature does herself the greater part of the workwhich remains to be done.But the moment that an artificer, asmith, a carpenter, or a weaver, for example, quits his workhouse,the sole source of his revenue is completely dried up.Nature doesnothing for him, he does all for himself.When he takes the field,therefore, in defence of the public, as he has no revenue tomaintain himself, he must necessarily be maintained by thepublic.But in a country of which a great part of the inhabitantsare artificers and manufacturers, a great part of the people who goto war must be drawn from those classes, and must therefore bemaintained by the public as long as they are employed in itsservice.When the art of war, too, has gradually grown up to be a veryintricate and complicated science, when the event of war ceases tobe determined, as in the first ages of society, by a single irregularskirmish or battle, but when the contest is generally spun outthrough several different campaigns, each of which lasts duringthe greater part of the year, it becomes universally necessary thatthe public should maintain those who serve the public in war, atleast while they are employed in that service.Whatever in time ofpeace might be the ordinary occupation of those who go to war, sovery tedious and expensive a service would otherwise be far tooAdam Smith ElecBook Classics The Wealth of Nations: Book 5 928heavy a burden upon them.After the second Persian war,accordingly, the armies of Athens seem to have been generallycomposed of mercenary troops, consisting, indeed, partly ofcitizens, but partly too of foreigners, and all of them equally hiredand paid at the expense of the state.From the time of the siege ofVeii, the armies of Rome received pay for their service during thetime which they remained in the field [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]